The Salt Crags

Atop the sheer cliffs that rise dramatically from the western shores beneath the Savage Sea, looming over the King of the Coin's quaint nation of traders and sellswords, the Shi Cei Qoji Coven reigns with a dramatically iron grip in the name of their Empress. Called the Stonecutters by the Dragonscarred below, the Shi Cei Qoji are an ancient Coven of sword saints, odd amongst the Oreiad in their focus on martial arts over sorcery and looked down upon as Dragonscarred might regard country bumpkins by many of the more celebrated Oreiad Manshrioi. Make no mistake, they are Manshrioi in their own right, but more humble, more reserved, and their magics more subtle. They direct their gifts inward, imbuing the best of their kind with impossible strength and durability and their strikes with a hardness and sharpness that can cleave cleanly through a slab of granite.
While the Shi Cei Qoji are looked down upon by other more prominent Covens of the Empire, their territories atop the Salt Crags brook no disrespect for the Empress and require the utmost loyalty from their pious subjects, both to the Coven and to both the law and reverence for the Imperial Dynasty. They are an unwavering, rigid people and demand the same from those they rule and are known for their merciless punishments meted out against those that would defy both their own law and Imperial law. Death being the most obvious of these, and the reward for breaking even the most minor of Imperial statutes, but exile, dismemberment, even spiritual severance - a process in which an Oreiad's ancestral relics are taken and destroyed - are common sentences for those that break with local law.
Shaofanguil is the fortress of the Shi Cei Qoji and the Holy City of Hei Lan unfolds around it. The winds sweep around it and throughout, and a thin veneer of salt, swept inland and up the mountains, coats the edges of every building. Salt crystals, carried by rare gales all the way into the Stonecutters' domain, are highly prized and considered artifacts of great magical import. Used by the Oreiad of the Salt Crags as focuses for ancestral anima, they are thought to be capable of storing, and thus transferring to their possessor, a tremendous amount of magical might. It is the law of the Shi Cei Qoji that any crystals of a specific size or larger are automatically the property of the Shi Cei Qoji Coven and that any pious found in possession of such a crystal be subject to both spiritual severance and exile from the Salt Crags entirely. Such Oreiad will not be welcome in any other Oreiad community thereafter and must, with only the rarest of exceptions, make their way amongst the Dragonscarred. It is rumored that such exiles are from whence the legendary soldiery and sellsword companies of Zelos first honed their martial techniques.
Even the pious of the region are more than competent warriors, and their daily lives consist of the grueling labors of salt farming, physical training, and, for most, worship. Indeed, the Shi Cei Qoji are regarded as saints of their deities of Wind and Stone and are afforded less a celebrity intrigue and more a divine reverence in a manner somewhat similar to the Dorun of the Icethorns. But while faith in the gods themselves is required of the Doruns' pious, faith in the Shi Cei Qoji is merely expected and the gods themselves still regarded with the antagonism inherent to the rest of Oreiad cultures. Many Oreiad pious quietly wonder amongst themselves in private moments if the Shi Cei Qoji and the Dorun are related, perhaps one having emerged from the other, but publically the two Covens make their hatred for one another abundantly clear.

Demographics

99.5% Oreiad, 0.4% Dragonscarred, 0.1% Dhogem

Type

Large city

Population

70,000

Location under

The Mountain Peaks